28 Quotes by Nan Shepherd

To create the creator most be in naked touch with experience. He must know his material in the raw, not canned in books or the experience of others.

To apprehend things—walking on a hill, seeing the light change, the mist, the dark, being aware, using the whole of one’s body to instruct the spirit—yes, that is a secret life one has and knows others have. But to be able to share it, in and through words—that is what frightens me ... It dissolves one’s being, I am no longer myself but a part of a life beyond myself when I read pages which are so much an expression of myself

One cannot know the rivers till one has seen them at their sources; but this journey to sources is not to be undertaken lightly. One walks among elementals, and elementals are not governable. There are awakened also in oneself by the contact elementals that are as unpredictable as wind or snow

... haste can do nothing with these hills. I knew when I had looked for a long time that I had hardly begun to see.

I realise that the tale of my traffic with a mountain is as valid today as it was then. That it was a traffic of love is sufficiently clear; but love pursued with fervour is one of the roads to knowledge

Like roundness, or silence, their quality is natural, but it is found so seldom in its absolute state that when we do so find it we are astonished.

my eyes were in my feet

The first law of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else.

It is the eye that discovers the mystery of light, not only the moon and the stars and the vast splendours of the Aurora, but the endless changes the earth undergoes under changing lights.